In short: Rampart (2011)

The first problem I have with Oren Moverman’s Rampart, a film that completely focuses on a racist, corrupt, violent cop with an utterly fucked up personal life as its protagonist is a simple one. The film never really bothers to explain to a viewer why they should care about this David Douglas Brown asshole.

Sure, Woody Harrelson’s playing him with great vigour, and I was never less than convinced that Brown is indeed a racist, corrupt, violent cop with an utterly fucked up personal life, but there’s little interest on display in really explaining or exploring how he got to be all of that, and where his humanity went if he ever had it. There’s also no attempt by the film to give a viewer something, anything about the guy to empathize with despite him being a crock of shit, no point where it tries to find our shared humanity. More problematic still, Brown isn’t just a horrible person, he’s also a really boring horrible person, doing shitty, violent acts that are quotidian and uninteresting when seen as a work of crime fiction. It’s not that the film lacks in telling details, it’s just that none of those details are actually interesting or enlightening to watch. Now, the film might be going for some kind of “banality of evil” shtick, but while that’s a perfectly good philosophical approach, it really doesn’t make the film anymore interesting to go through.


As a matter of more personal taste, I can’t say I have much time for Moverman’s direction either. It’s the kind of visual style that tries to signal “authenticity” by framing scenes badly – a particular favourite of Moverman’s seem to be dialogue scenes where we see nothing of the actors’ faces, because hiding actors behind the furniture is so avantgarde – pointlessly wobbling the camera around, and generally pretending that looking like shit makes a film “more real”. And yes, of course the dialogue’s mumbled (when the film doesn’t just decide to shoot through a window and muffle the sound as if the mikes were behind that window too) and meandering, and much of Los Angeles is apparently piss-yellow.